


the Golgothan pact

by Valxyri



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, Cyborgs, Gen, Other, Science Fiction, Space Opera
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-23 10:11:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/620978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valxyri/pseuds/Valxyri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An original story about mutants and cyborgs and space and other cool things. Jack Lawrence strikes out into the wild galactic frontier to seek a long vanished race from the dawn of human history, but what he finds across the Star Gap could bring the Human empire to it's knees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the Golgothan pact

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a start, if it generates some interest i may continue, please review! (:

My name is Doctor Jack Lawrence, I am human, I was born on Earth.  
This is the story of how I left.   
The restaurant was called Aunties Eatery it was on a small, egg shaped moon of an uninhabitable gas giant at the furthest edge of the Orion Arm’s military reach. The food was all processed, shipped out from more fertile ground or grown hydroponically in the depths of the planetoid. It was dirty and smelled of grease, the seat cushions on the booth benches were cracked from overuse.  
The worst part of space travel is the food. It’s all uniformly awful, indistinguishable from other forms of reprocessed nano protein and a kind of artificial grey. I scrolled through the menu idly, thinking of home, of America, of the girls on the beach in Pennsylvnia. Earth, gem of peace, eden of the galaxy, home.   
I thought of tomatoes grown in the soil and of diving headfirst into a crystal clear mountain lake, or into a whole ocean of water, drinking in the sunlight.   
I stared at the window, the shop across the narrow corridor of the space station apparently sold “pleasure”, a girl stood in the shop window, scantily clad with spike heels and long blonde hair, her features slightly askew, her spine crooked. she was what I had come to recognize as a plague victim, the government would give her medicine, stem cells, retrobot nano transmitters, anything to keep her condition from degrading. But that was just the problem, her genes had been destroyed, too much radiation too much splicing and resequencing, over long generations of Earthlings living where they were never meant to live, she had been changed forever, she was barely human.   
I watched her approach a passing pedestrian, opening her shirt and smiling. he brushed her aside and she fastened the button with a smirk and a look of deep exhaustion.   
There were billions like her, all across the Orion Arm Protectorates. Bilions who slowly felt their bodies fall apart around them. I sighed, cracking my knuckles frowning around at my fellow diner patrons. they were all space people, a strange breed, more twisted by Plague than anyone closer to earth.   
I thought longfully of home, of the poor twisted creature that was humanity, a population grown so vast that it outgrew a whole planet, outgrew bilions of planets, forced itself into every halfway habitable rock in the orion arm.  
It wasn't the first time I would miss Earth, we had gardens and sunshine and dirt, rare commodities in the galaxy at large. who would have guessed a thousand years ago that someday water would be more valuable than diamonds.   
But I had left the sunshine and the dirt, and the rain, no planet had rain like Earth. I had left them all in exchange for void and silence and freefall.   
I had slogged through the cold and the darkness and the whispers to get this far. This rock, this crappy diner at the edge of the galaxy. and all my hopes hung on the woman who, just at that moment was sauntering through the airlock.   
She was, apparently the only pilot who would run the Gap as far as far as Prashda and the smuggler’s moon deep in the starless void between Human territory and the rest of the MilkyWay. I had spent months in preparation, tracking down leads meeting with shady characters in dark corners of taverns and in greasy space docks.   
We had been in communication for several weeks at that point but I had yet to lay eyes on her. She stood for a moment inside the door, her limbs had the lanky, toneless look which light gravity usually created. Atrophied muscles. Her hair was big and dark and floating in the light gravity. She was clothed in practical, atmospherically sealed mechanic’s pullovers. she removed a pair of expertly repaired sunglasses and met my eye with a smile.   
“Rosie Carthage.” she said, sliding into the seat across from me.   
“Jack Lawrence.”  
“Youre shorter in your halogram.”  
“And you weren't looking at my tits in yours.” she flashed at least four cuspids.   
I wondered in an irrational flash of paranoia, weather she might not be entirely human. A thought I quickly suppressed, mutants took many different forms, all of which I had yet to see.   
“I've been over our tapes,” she caught my eye, “and i just have one question.”   
“What’s that?”   
“Why would a human ever leave the Orion Arm?”   
it was a good question and one i had been considdering myself for a ong while.   
“I had an existential crisis.” I blinked but didn’t give her anything with my body language. Only my fingers moved, spinning a paper coaster on the plastic table top. The holographic menu scrolled by under us. I was getting jalapeño poppers and black coffee, she was reading the list of pies.  
“Get whatever you want.” I prompted her with an encouraging smile.  
“It’s really all the same thing.” she selected something, “Answer my question, Earthling!why would a human ever leave the Orion arm?”  
“Aren’t you Orion?” I asked, finally voicing my concern. I thought that I was psychologically prepared for the realities of the Sentienti but as yet I had not encountered anything but my fellow Orion Arm citizens of Earth and her protectorates. Humans.  
“I am an evolved hominid, with Terran ancestry; I am nearly eighty percent unmodified, ninety two percent organic, enough to qualify for citizenship.” She smiled and her lips were sculpted and dark, I wondered if they were part of the percent that was still alive. She was thin, her skin was yellow from artificial ultraviolet radiation, I wondered if I found that sexy, or just medically interesting.  
At that time in the galaxy there were humans (like me), there were things that were mostly human, using minimal, non invasive or medically necessary bionics, there were mutants, like Rosie, but there were no aliens, and there were certainly no true Cyborgs, at least that was what they wanted us to believe.  
The service drone stopped with a squeal in front of our table. Placing two coffee mugs in front of us and pouring out dark liquid from her robotic limbs. The coffee steamed and frothed. Rosie rotated the cup and picked it up, the last two fingers on her hand were robotic.  
“I only have basic identification implants, not even true bionics.” I confessed.  
“Well then, you must be from Earth!” she peered at me over the rim of her mug while the service drone deposited a slice of coconut cream pie in front of her and a watery lump of what was apparently jalapeño poppers in front of me.  
“New York city.” I try to keep my voice low; I’d been warned about the crime in the outer edges of human territory. Everyone knew that everyone from Earth had money.  
“Hot damn, you must be royalty.” She forked a lump of jiggling custard into her mouth. i could tell that i was being assessed, “You like the chancellor? you agree with him? you believe in the Divine Right of Stars?” how i answered these questions would bear heavily on weather she would take me where I needed to go, tact was necessary.  
I sipped my coffee, “I don’t agree with it. I don’t agree with what they are doing.”  
“And the Sentienti, how would you classify them?”   
“The government calls them terrorists.”  
“and you.”  
“I don’t know, they're just different from us is all, and at the same time, not different at all, I suppose... I would rather find out for myself.”  
She looked at me with a crooked expression, unreadable, “that’s a step in the right direction, still doesn’t answer my question, Earthling. Why would you leave the Orion arm, with your standing, your caste, you aren't even modified?”  
I stared into my coffee for a long moment, soft jazz music tinkled through the thick air of the restaurant, the dome of stars above us filtered down into soft space light, “I seek Homo Bionica.”  
She shook her head, “you aren’t the first.”  
“Government representatives, scientific expeditions, I am just one man.” I leaned forward eagerly, clutching my mug. “I can get places officials can’t.”  
“There’s no proof that any still exist.”  
“Because the government keeps it quiet, I just…” I dragged one hand through my hair, it stood on end, “there has to be wreckage, there has to be someone left. I have to know what happened.”  
“And why do you want to know?” she pulled her fork through her lips.  
“I believe… if they still exist… they may have the answer to the…” I glanced over my shoulder the restaurant was, for the most part completely empty, “to the problem of the Plague.”  
“Oh I see,” she said around a mouthful of pie, “you’re one of those conspiracy theorists, you’re a nutjob!”  
“Regardless,” I waved her aside, “I’m a nutjob with money, I just need to get to Prashda.”  
“The smuggler’s moon?” she coughed into her napkin.  
“You know where it is?”   
“For a price I do.”  
“Ten thousand,” I offered, “five now five upon arrival.”   
“Give me the ride back too and we’ve got a deal.”  
“Twenty thousand round trip?”  
“Sounds good.” She smiled, apparently satisfied with my offer, “I may just get another slice of pie.”  
I pried one jalapeño popper from the lump, it tasted no better than it looked.  
“Cyborgs are monsters.” She said, watching me eat. “Don’t romanticize them.”  
“Have you met one?” I pulled apart the greasy nugget, clear liquid dripped from inside of it  
“No. But you hear stories, from aliens mostly, never humans, they kill humans on sight, that’s why the stories never get back to Earth, why you’ve never heard them.” She frowned. “they say that they have to extract the brain between the age of three and eight earth years, that the child must be fully conscious, paralyzed and not anaesthetized, when they saw open her skull.”  
“Yes, I’ve heard, I went to church as a boy too.”  
“You don’t believe it?”   
“Not a word, its propaganda.”  
“So you’re going off, into the lawless void of civilization that is the Gap. On a fool’s errand to find a race of child torturing psychopathic robots who may or may not ACTUALLY still exist… and you’re doing this all in the name of curiosity, because you think they have the cure for the Plague that the government still will not admit exists?”  
“Exactly!”   
“And you will pay me twenty thousand Orion credits to get you as far as Prashda?”  
“Yes.”  
“Sounds like fun.”


End file.
